How to wear clothes articles - The Guardian

[tott]

How to wear clothes

Can utility really be chic?

Jess Cartner-Morley
Saturday October 14, 2006
The Guardian

When fashion designers want to "do" practical - primarily for shock value, you understand - they call it utility. For some reason, designers' notions of utility revolve around making clothes extra-large, adding several drawstrings (at hem, waist and/or hood) to enable them to fit, slapping on an inordinate number of odd-sized pockets, and finishing off with a storm flap or two for good measure.

Exactly why this mode of dress is more practical than the tried-and-trusted formula of clothes the right size teamed with a handbag, I have not yet been able to establish, but I'm attempting to keep an open mind. After all, it has not escaped my notice that if I see a man going to work wearing trousers in faintly shiny anorak-fabric with lots of funny zippy pockets, and carrying a messenger-style courier bag, he will often turn out to be reading the Guardian. So I suspect many esteemed readers will be more excited than I am, for once, by the new Prada collection, which features a parka for the price of a small car. The point is not that you have to buy the parka, but that its very existence makes you, and your funny little zippy pockets, fashionable once again.

Interpreters of such things like to theorise that utility fashion comes into play at times of high anxiety, when we feel the need to be protected from the perils of modern life. I don't buy it, myself; in the event of urban warfare, I doubt the hammer loop on your trousers would be much cop against a handbag as heavy as mine. Whoops, getting a bit judgmental. Anyway, forget practicality: think fashion. Men: remember that the well-dressed man never ruins the line of his clothes by using his pockets. And women: never, ever wear utility with denim. Instead, a parka over a cocktail dress is the winter version of wellies with hotpants. You heard it here first.

 

[tott]

How to wear clothes

Why it's tricky buying a winter coat

Jess Cartner-Morley
Saturday October 21, 2006
The Guardian

I don't have a lot of truck with nostalgia for the good old days, warm beer not being my cup of tea, as it were, but just now I find myself, as I prepare for my biannual coat purchase, feeling wistful about a time when buying a coat was a straightforward business.

Until not so long ago, unless you were a card-carrying eccentric, you bought something warm, smart and almost certainly black. But now the coat has become at least as much a fashion item as a practical one. We are magpies, drawn to impractical treats such as wool coats in winter white and taffeta trenchcoats that wilt in the lightest of showers.

Don't get me wrong. I am all for flair in the coat department. A good coat should waft behind it an air of intrigue, like a good perfume: think of the cloak in The French Lieutenant's Woman. After all, during the winter months, your indoor clothes are on display only in those environments where you are a known quantity - at home, in the office. Your coat is your chance to project an idealised, snapshot self-image as you stride along the street.

I have seen the coat I want: it's from Wallis, it's £80, it's camel (glamorous but less blatantly Wag-ish than white), has an A-line swing, three-quarter-length sleeves (I may invest in elbow-length gloves; I have not yet decided if they are fabulous or fit only for femmes fatales in Sunday-night Agatha Christie adaptations), and huge buttons (the cheat's nod to the volume trend).

Coats work best when they are in harmony with your wardrobe. If you wear cinched-waist outfits, belted coats will give the best silhouette; if your favoured skirt length is to the knee, a coat more than an inch or two longer or shorter will overcomplicate matters. A touch of mystery is good, too complicated is bad. Can it really be a coincidence that both Columbo and Clouseau were renowned for bad coats?

 

[PrinceOfCats]

Men: remember that the well-dressed man never ruins the line of his clothes by using his pockets.

Thinking a few steps ahead of old Jessie, a bag also ruins the line of one's clothes, by pulling everything to one side, so the moral of the story is either that a well-dressed man has nothing to carry or that he carries a briefcase without a shoulder strap.

 

[melt977]

Layers with everything

[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Jess Cartner-Morley
Saturday October 28, 2006
The Guardian

[/FONT]
Layering works on two very different levels, sort of like The Simpsons. At its most basic, it is part of even the most trend-shy wardrobe: after all, wearing a vest under your shirt, grandad-style, is layering of sorts, even if it isn't going to win you any style plaudits. Then there is "layering" in the fashion sense, which is - let's be clear about this from the start - nothing to do with keeping warm. Fashion-layering is about putting things together in a way that looks deliberately topsy-turvy, like a fashion anagram: wearing a jacket with cropped sleeves over a long-sleeved blouse, say, so you look polished and suited, but quirky at the same time.

I have had a soft spot for sleeve-layering for about 16 years, ever since the first episode of the uncannily fashion-forward Twin Peaks, in which Bobby wore a short-sleeved T-shirt over a long-sleeved one. It is a look that has since been cheapened by skater-kid overkill, but when translated into lady-clothes, it is still one of the easiest and most impressive sartorial tricks to have, ahem, up your sleeve. For those who mastered the crop-sleeve-jacket-over-blouse thing last winter, this season's equivalent of the tying-a-knot-in-the-cherry-stalk stunt is sleeveless shift dresses over long-sleeved T-shirts.

Sounds too much like hard work? Allow me to point out a simple short cut. All you really need to do to make your layering look knowing and witty, rather than prosaic and practical, is to wear things the wrong way round. Instead of a short-sleeved T-shirt under a jumper, wear a long-sleeved T-shirt under a short-sleeved jumper. Instead of a vest under a blouse, wear a blouse under a tank top. As codes go, it's not exactly Bletchley Park: you can crack it and still have time to do the quick crossword over breakfast. And you'll be lovely and warm, too.

 

[Alliecat]

Melt977 - once again thanks for posting these - great reading!

 

[melt977]

^ no probs...

 

[melt977]

Getting round a woolly issue



[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Jess Cartner-Morley
Saturday November 4, 2006
The Guardian

[/FONT]Sweater dresses look so easy. Cosy, one-step, non-iron winter dressing, with no tight waistband to give you away when your 4pm KitKat habit starts to show. Don't be fooled. It's a fashion honeytrap. Whereas a tailored suit may look scary on the hanger but, like a true friend, will help you show your best side, a sweater dress will heartlessly highlight your potbelly to all and sundry.

By respecting a few basic rules, however, you can make a sweater dress work for you. Get it right and you will feel as pleasingly cosy as a hot-water bottle in a fluffy cover. (Get it wrong and you will look as wobbly and rotund as said hot-water bottle in said fluffy cover.)

First: length. Contrary to what you might think, longer is not better. Knee-length is the longest you should ever go; a bit of (opaque-clad) thigh is best. You should look a bit like you're wearing a long sweater - possibly your boyfriend's. This is crucial, because it is from this that the sweater dress derives the air of smug, loved-up weekend-mini-break sexiness we're after.

Second: texture. If your figure is less than thoroughbred, chunky knits are much more forgiving than fine wool; if the mere thought of a chunky wool dress makes you feel hot and itchy, go for fine wool but with pockets, or big buttons, or a decorative tie-belt, or all three - anything to distract from the saddlebags. (Don't, however, go for fluffy, angora-esque fabrics which, far from making you look strokeably kittenish will, in fact, make you resemble a giant hairball.)

Third: if you get home with a dress you had hoped made you look like a moody French actress and discover that it makes you look like a large knitted apple, do not despair. Get a big belt and cinch it tight. Not the comfort-blanket dress you had in mind, maybe, but at least your KitKat secret is safe once more.

 

[Alliecat]

Ooh the kit kat secret... Kit kat my sweet friend of yore.

 

[melt977]

Checking out time



[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Jess Cartner-Morley
Saturday November 11, 2006
The Guardian

[/FONT]I should have learnt my lesson when it comes to rubbishing trends. I seem to recall totally trashing puffballs and then shamelessly skipping around in one later in the season. Certainly I was vociferously "anti" skinny jeans at first, only to backtrack with indecent haste and start muttering about "straight leg rather than drainpipe" shapes within a matter of months. Truly I am wasted on this fashion lark. I should have been a politician!

Nonetheless, this season has thrown up a prime example of a trend just crying out to be scorned: tartan. If you are wearing tartan you are clearly trying to prove something. Either (a) that you are Scottish or (b) that you are very, very fashionable, even more so than people currently wearing mustard-coloured knitwear.

In each case I suspect that you are trying to prove it to us because of some lingering insecurity on the subject yourself. But I digress. The wearing of tartan this season - among the non-Scottish, that is, do keep up - is intended, I can only suppose, to prove to the viewing public that you have read all those Hot New Season Trends supplements that come with autumn glossies. And read them, moreover, right to the last page, where they put all the kooky and unflattering trends that only the chronically easily led would even consider. Film buffs quote obscure dialogue and hang out at early-evening screenings at the NFT to prove they belong; this season, fashion buffs wear either tartan or huge rocking-chair wooden platform shoes. (Or, heaven forbid, both.)

My problem with tartan boils down to this: frankly, you'd look better in almost anything else. Oh, and before you check-free mates think you've got away lightly this week, one more word. Houndstooth. This is tartan, but in black and white. Herringbone, yes (skirt); houndstooth, no. And that's my final word on the subject. Probably.